Hi, I'm Randy Moore, Chief of the USDA Forest Service.
Our mission at the Forest Service is to sustain the health, diversity and productivity of the
nation's forests and grasslands, to meet the needs of present and future generations
and as you know we work with the entire wildland fire community to keep wildfires from threatening
lives, homes, communities and all the benefits people get from their forest and grassland
clean air, water, opportunities for outdoor recreation and so much more.
In recent years wildfires in the west have reached crisis proportion despite everything that we've
been doing for decades to reduce wildfire risk. What is the challenge facing us when what have
we been doing to meet those challenges and what needs to change? and the challenge we
face is that forests have changed a lot over the last 170 years. For millennia, Native Americans
they routinely and they intentionally burned vast areas of land for many different reasons.
Fire is you know, very important to us, it was very important to us in many areas. One of the
most important areas was conservation. Pikuni people were very very conscious of making sure
that when they left the area that it was clean and that it was going to come back just the way
they found it, so when they left camp they would burn the area so that the things they left there
was all burned, everything was burned all grounds and all and what that did was it left it to renew.
We will make a fire deliberately burn the area where we know that certain plants are,
it'll burn them down and then they'll grow back.
And the resulting landscape cultivated by indigenous burning and naturally ignited fires
was a healthy and resilient patchwork landscape. So how did we go from a patchy landscape,
to a dense carpet of forests? Well for one thing the federal government moved indigenous people
from their ancestral homelands onto reservations and that minimized cultural burning where they
remained. A century of livestock grazing, road and rail construction, the logging of old trees in old
forests and adopting a policy of fire exclusion shortly after the 1910 big burn all these things
led to the removal of fire from the ecosystem and to the creation of overly dense forests.
Let's talk a little more about these causes. So European settlement in the 1800s brought
livestock grazing and if you think about it cattle and sheep are eating the grasses that helped
spread the many historical fires that had once kept forests open and patchy. Grazing prevented
fires from thinning out trees and regularly burning up dead wood and other grasses and shrubs.
Roads and railroads they sparked new accidental fires but they also acted as fire breaks that
interrupted the natural flow of many low-intensity fires, and in 1910 the Big Burn spread across
3 million acres from Washington all the way to northwestern Montana, it burned several towns
and it killed 87 people and from this day forward wildfire would become public enemy
number one and that led the Forest Service to develop a policy of fire exclusion.
And the well-intentioned the policy was based on a belief that wildland fire was now bad for forests
and should be prevented or suppressed wherever found, and the belief turned out to be mistaken,
because it prevented fire from thinning forests and rejuvenating grasslands ,meadows and open
woodlands. In the 1940s a strong timber industry led to the removal of big and
old trees that were survivors of century of repeated fires and this removed a key
ecological backbone of many western forests and one of the main pillars of healthy forests.
So it was the contribution of numerous things: reducing indigenous burning, livestock grazing,
building roads and rails, old tree logging and fire suppression that all contributed
to these now dense and overgrown forests that we see out there today.
And when you layer in a rapidly warming and drying climate you have a recipe for
megafires. A megafire is one that burns at least a hundred thousand acres, that's a very big fire,
and over the last 20 years with extreme fire weather and fires now burning year
round in some places the frequency of these mega fires well it's increased.
The good news is that we know what to do based on decades of science and experience.
In overgrown forest we need to use mechanical thinning and other means to reduce stocking
levels, then we need to return to low intensity fires to treat these fire adapted forests. In
the right places at the right scale our thinning and burning treatments help wildland firefighters
respond to wildfires safely and effective. These are the tools. Forest treatments that can be used
to make forests healthy and resilient to a changing climate and worsening wildfires.
Mechanical thinning is the removal of trees that grew in during this long period of fire exclusion
and we use these tools to thin out forest and set up the landscape for low and moderate intensity
burning whether it comes by wild or prescribed fires. We're setting the forest up for success,
and it's used to create safe spacing between trees. Prescribed fires are planned, low and
moderate intensity burning of debris, forest litter, deadened down trees, brush and ladder
fuels. What's a ladder fuel? Ladder fuels include small and medium-sized trees that act as a ladder
carrying a fire from the dead wood on the forest floor to the tops of large trees. Like nature's
cleanup crew prescribed fires consume fuels that could burn in large and severe fires.
Prescribed fires leave most larger trees intact and help to make conditions more fire resistant.
Prescribed fires are intentionally set by wildland fire professionals when conditions are right,
they're carefully managed according to burn plans and when conditions are right professional
fire crews can sometimes use wildfires in the same way as prescribed fires. That's a managed
wildfire. These are carefully managed low and moderate intensity fires that consume fuels
and restore patchy fire adapted landscapes. The Forest Service 10-year Wildfire Crisis Strategy
is prepared to restore patchy forested landscapes through mechanical thinning and then returning
fire to the land at the scale that is needed to match the scale of the wildfire risk. The goal
is to safely return fire to the land and use it for benefits just as the indigenous people did.
By learning from tribes and by working with key partners and stakeholders we look forward
to increasing the pace and scale of these forest health treatments. In recent decades the Forest
Service is treated up to three and a half million acres per year across national forest lands and up
to two million acres per year in the west, but our treatments have rarely approached the scale of the
needed work partly because our annual funding for fuels treatment has been limited and uncertain.
It will take a paradigm shift to confront the wildfire crisis facing the nation.
The old paradigm is to use our limited funds and capacity to scatter treatments randomly across
the landscape to the best of our limited ability. The new paradigm is to step up the pace and scale
of our treatments to match the actual scale of wildfire risk across the landscape matching the
actual scale of wildfire at risk will make it all the difference. In January we released a 10-year
strategy and implementation plan for confronting the wildfire crisis, we will dramatically increase
fuels and forest health treatments by up to four times the current treatment levels in the west.
Over the next 10 years we'll place treatments over and above our current treatment levels,
we will treat up to an additional 20 million acres of national forest system lands, we will work with
partners to treat up to an additional 30 million acres of other federal, state, tribal and private
lands and then we will follow up with maintenance treatments at intervals of 10 to 15 years.